Night of Power: The Betrayal of the Middle East

“We’ll have thee, as our rare monsters are,
painted on a pole,
and under it here
may you see the tyrant.”
– William Shakespeare Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 8.

A review: Night of Power: The Betrayal of the Middle East by Robert Fisk.

I will start this review at the chapter titled “Dear Moussa..” because it is about the Arab Spring coming to Bahrain. Coincidentally, at that time I interviewed a senior nurse who was attacked by the Bahraini police in Manama at the Pearl Roundabout. The account given by Robert Fisk, as they say: ‘spoke to me’. Robert Fisk interpreted these tumultuous events in this way:

Bahrain

“Nor were Western leaders calling for the overthrow of the autocrat who ran Bahrain, a king who insisted on being addressed as His Majesty, even though his pocket-sized Emirate was more than 2000 times smaller than Libya. Nor was NATO about to defend unarmed demonstrators, who were at the mercy of the local king’s police and soldiers. They were Shiites confronted by a monarch representing a Sunni minority, and while Libya now lay open to anarchy and the West’s greed, King Hamad bin Iza Al Khalifa of Bahrain had an insurance policy that any Arab nation might envy, a guarantee of its little kingdom, from its Sunni Saudi neighbors, a headquarters for the U.S. Fifth Fleet, with more than 4000 American military personnel, and a base for the Royal Navy. This was not the moment for Obama’s liberalism and Cameron’s moral triumphalism to hinder the suppression of Shiite Bahrainis demanding freedom. A 70% majority, whose sympathetically, and then only notionally, was Iran.

And further on, “then the soldiers suddenly started shooting. One was firing a machine gun from the top of a personnel carrier. There were police, but they just left as the soldiers shot at us, but you know, the people in Bahrain have changed. They didn’t want to run away. They faced the bullets with their bodies.”

According to Bob Fisk’s account, this happened outside the Salmania Medical Complex on the 18th of March, 2011. He faithfully gives the account of a hospital orderly: “The protests now occurring at the hospital had already drawn in 1000s of Shiites, including hundreds of doctors and nurses from all over Bahraini capital of Manama, still in their white gowns, but their anger turned to near hysteria when the dying and wounded were now brought in, up to 100 doctors had crowded into the emergency rooms, shouting and cursing their king and their government, as paramedics fought to push trolleys loaded with the latest victims through screaming crowds, one man had a thick wad of bandages stuffed into his chest, but blood was already staining his torso, running down his dreams, jeans, dripping off the trolley, he has a live round in his chest, and now there is air and blood in his lungs. The nurse beside him shouted at me amid the confusion. I think he is going. “

The account given by Robert Fisk was very similar to that given to me by the head of the Bahraini Nurses Federation in 2012. Earlier on in the chapter, Fisk describes the Arab Spring: “The sun shone blood red over the Middle East in February 2012. The earthquake of the past year had been the most tumultuous political experience since the fall of the Ottoman Empire. The docile, supine, cringing Arabs of Orientalism had transformed themselves into fighters for the freedom, liberty, and dignity which we Westerners had always assumed it was our unique role to play in the world.

Suffice it to say, it is very hard to understand the region and the wars that have afflicted West Asia for so long at the hands of the West, it is very hard to understand without the independent journalism that Robert Fisk represents in both this book and in his previous book, The Great War for Civilization. I commend any person interested in opposing Israel’s genocide in Gaza and in Lebanon to read both these books.

Sadly, after 40 or so years reporting on the Middle East, Robert Fisk died before the completion of this book. Fortuneately his wife, Nelofa Pazira-Fisk, finished the task. For this we should be grateful for it reveals so much across the region.

Syria

From the Arab uprisings and the Syrian civil war to Israel’s conflicts with Palestine and Lebanon, Fisk condemns the West’s ongoing hypocrisy and interference, while revealing the horrific truth of life on the ground, unafraid to criticize authority and unpick complex truths. Fisk creates a compelling narrative of passionate and engaging journalism, historical analysis, and eyewitness reporting. It comes close to prophecy.

Robert Fisk passed away on the 30th of October, 2020, just three years prior to Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the subsequent United States war of aggression against Iran,This promises to bring down the world economy if it persists.Robert Fisk passed away on the 30th of October, 2020, just three years prior to Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the subsequent United States war of aggression against Iran,This promises to bring down the world economy if it persists.

Much has been written in these pages about the Syrian civil war, mostly by other authors, and not by myself. For having not been there, I could not know what was really going on. Nevertheless, I’d like to quote a piece from Robert Fisk, who lived in the adjoining country and traveled with his wife into Syria during the civil war, being in the heart of the ISIS uprising in Aleppo, that ancient city with so many museums and such a history. This is what he wrote in his chapter titled The Men in White Socks:

“In its condemnation of Middle East dictatorships, the West has easily judged these corrupt and cruel autocracies according to their usefulness to the West. If the tyrants were allies, we would describe them as strongmen who imposed an iron rule over their people, but who remained loyal friends. Ben Ali, Mubarak, the Shah of Iran, and the monarchies of the Gulf fitted this description. So, from time to time, did Saddam Hussein when he was invading Iran, rather than Kuwait and even Gaddafi, when he was offering up his nuclear playpen to intelligence authorities, those who fell outside the pliable category were monsters. Saddam, for example, after he invaded Kuwait, or Iran’s new leaders after they dethroned the Shah, and save for a few smiles from Nixon and the Carter administrations and a French president or two, Assad pere et fils slotted neatly into the role of despots.

The strongman/tyrant routine also depended on the amicable nature of the loyal dictators towards Israel. Mubarak, Ben Ali, and Gulf Arabs and King Hussein of Jordan passed this test with almost full marks.

Saddam’s hatred for Israel could sometimes be accommodated, depending on his equal hatred for the Iranians and his relationship with Saudi Arabia. Ruling over a land containing almost 150 billion barrels of oil reserves also helped. Petty miscreants who did not own a state, revolutionaries, successivists, or irredentists might be forgiven, even admired, if they acquiesced in the power of the West friends. Although this could induce vertigo in the chosen few, Arafat’s transition from super terrorist in Beirut in the 1980s to super diplomat after making peace with Israel in the 1990s, and then back into super terrorist after he refused Israel’s truncated version of an independent Palestine in 2000 was enough to induce paroxysm. But the Assad Caliphate was, in that most unimaginative of Baathis rhetoric, steadfast. The regime of Hafez and Bashar was the beating heart of Arabism, the rock of Palestinian resistance, the mortal enemy of Zionism, and inevitably the true friend of the Soviet Union and its somewhat truncated but equally tyrannical successor, unless Kissinger needed a ceasefire in the Golan, or Obama could arrange direct negotiations with Israel, Syria and its Shia Alawite leaders were untrustworthy, barbaric, sadistic terrorists, murderers, and executioners.

For those of us who lived in the region and were burdened with the cursed privilege of visiting these torture states, it was impossible to Persuade visitors that a certain perspective might be adopted if anything like reality was to color their view of evil carnate.”

Palestine

Robert Fisk went to Palestine many times. This is but one of his reports:

In the 2008 ‘war’, just 2 days before the destruction of Gaza ended Israeli tanks shelled the home of  Dr I z z e l d i n  A b u e l a i s h who was a well-known figure in Israel because he was one of the few Palestinian doctors who had worked in Israeli hospitals.

“Israeli tanks fired shells into his home tearing to pieces three of his daughters and a niece blasting out the eye of another daughter and because Dr is a LED in abulesh was a well now in figure in Israel and because he was reporting for an Israeli station that very night everyone in the country and across the West bank witness the anguish and the fury of a truly good man.

The IDF claimed that there were gunman on the roof of his home.

To which Abuelaish replied, his remarks laced with cynicism:

“These are the weapons the books and their clothes these were the handouts there you see these are her handouts for the courses that she studies which is staying with her blood these are the books weapons which I equipped my daughters with with education with knowledge with dreams with hopes with loves.”

It was the first time Israelis had glimpse in real time the suffering and death of Palestinian civilians abouleh spoke in Hebrew his voice filled with grief but also with indignation:

” I had left the room second’s earlier how would government gunman have reached the roof from where would they have entered I have never done anything wrong in my life if you don’t believe Palestinians ask Israelis who Dr Abuelaish is they should just admit they made a mistake there is no shame in making a mistake but don’t deceive the nation.”

“And if the Americans could bomb a hospital in Serbia or a civilian housing estate in Baghdad, who were the hypocritical West to object when the Israeli army slaughtered the innocents of Lebanon and Gaza in identical ways?

This, then, is another theme of this book; the ‘normalisation’ of this latest warfare, which deletes the protection of civilians enshrined in international law in favour of a new and cruel morality.” ― Robert Fisk, Night of Power: The Betrayal of the Middle East

Vale Robert Fisk, Independent Journalist.

Night of Power – the betrayal of the Middle East by Robert Fisk is available in Brisbane City Council libraries.

Ian Curr
31 July 2026